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Looking For A Wideband Capable Soft Phone

Over the coming weeks and months I hope to explore wideband voice in greater depth. My recent purchase of a couple of Polycom IP650s and the Siemens S685IP provide me with some hardware end-points. I may also buy a snom phone as well, with the optional Klarvoice handset.

However, some of what I wish to undertake would be well served by a soft phone. As yet I have been unable to find a software that supports the G.722 wideband codec.

Counterpath‘s Eyebeam & Bria claim to support G.722 but in fact they only provide that feature to OEMs licensing a significant quantity of copies. They don’t provide it in retail versions sold from their web site. It grieves me to think that I bought a number of X-Pro licenses then had no migration path into the newer products as they were introduced.

Snom offered a soft phone implementation of one of their 360 hard phone, but it doesn’t support the full suite of codecs found in the hardware implementation.

This afternoon I learned about eyeP Media Communicator 6.0 and downloaded a copy for evaluation. It claims support for G.722 and G.722.2, which would provide not only wideband audio but also lower bandwidth usage. I’ll post about this once I’ve had a chance to give it a workout.

I’ve looked into various softwares including Gizmo5, Firefly, Wengo and Zoiper. WengoPhone supports AMR-WB  which is G.722.2, but not the older G.722. Since my hardware phones support G.722 I need the soft phone to handle this as well.

So I’m still looking for options. I’ve posted questions about wideband capable soft phones on the asterisk-users and voip-users-conference mailing lists but there were almost no responses.

Any suggestions are most welcome.

This Post Has 5 Comments
  1. CoutnerPath actually offers a number of wideband codecs in the retail version.

    Broadvoice 32 (bv32), which is my favourite and Speex wideband

  2. Sean,

    Thanks for the comment. What you say is true, but does not solve my issue. I really want to experiment with wideband interoperability with hardware phones. Those codecs that you mention are not all that useful in this regard. Hardware support for wideband seems to revolve around G.722, G.722.1 and G.722.2.

    G.722 is an older standard and freely available. Polycom just released G.722.1 under a royalty free license last month.

  3. Michael,

    I am excited to see your interest in wideband telephony. ZipDX is a wideband audio conferencing service that interoperates with the hardphones you are exploring. We have a version of eyeBeam that supports G.722. E-mail me and I’ll get you a copy.

    David

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